Hey everybody welcome back to episode 19 of cold case murder mysteries. I'm your host

Ryan Kraus dragging you beneath the surface of these murky waters once again as we indulge in a very special bonus episode today, one I've recorded in celebration of Halloween, and more specifically in honor of iconic horror director Toby Hooper, who brought us

poldergeist among others. The film we're going to be analyzing, however, is the incomparable

to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Now, the 1974 original was unlike anything anybody had ever seen at the time it was released.

And despite the immediate reaction that this was a blood and guts type film, there's actually very little blood.

The success of this masterpiece is not, in any way, derived from sensationalism or gratuity.

What we find, upon peeling back to surface of what we see on screen, is nothing less than a very well-crafted coming-of-age tale told with great simplicity, in the vein of Rosemary's baby,

and one that ends very much the same way

with a striking image of tragedy.

And this is essentially what separates its quality

from the nearly infinite number of imitators to follow who would attempt to

utilize a formula in terms of plot to mimic the success of this film to no avail.

So we're going to look at why that's happened with such frequency.

The basis for it is that this film is a carefully considered metaphor,

which is very powerful in the genre because the physical manifestation of emotional horrors

essentially equates to the same thing. The problem then became

the copycats proceeded to extract the framework of the plot from the movie and

place it within a different location with different young people.

At that point, the product was no longer authentic, and the disappointment the audience is

what undoubtedly experienced by way of the absence of the overarching metaphor was then compensated for in the way of

blood and guts. It got so bad that when the cabin in the woods was released, the

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